Eurenglish 101

The European Union has twenty-four official languages, but, according to Jeremy Gardner, a senior translator at the European Court of Auditors, the real number is closer to twenty-three and a half. Gardner has compiled an anthology of offenses committed in what has come to be known as Eurenglish—an interoffice dialect that, as he writes in “A Brief List of Misused English Terms in E.U. Publications,” relies upon “words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the E.U. institutions.” Last year, when Gardner published his report, it did not garner a tremendous amount of attention. But the document resurfaced this spring, provoking almost as much amusement across Europe as did the E.U.’s attempt to prohibit restaurants from serving olive oil in unmarked cruets. (“Je ne vinaigrette rien,” someone wrote on Twitter.) On the Web site of the London Review of Books, Glen Newey wrote, of Gardner’s project, “Turning Eurenglish back into sense feels a bit like the Laputan project of reducing human excrement to its original food.” A headline in Le Monde asked, “Parlez-vous la novlangue bruxelloise?” The conditionalities seemed adequate to incite planification for a conference in the frame of which Gardner could precise himself.

“Do you have a Prosecco?” Gardner asked the waiter. He had stopped for lunch at the Belgian Arms, a wisteria-covered pub outside London overlooking a small pond. Gardner, whose wife is Italian, has lived abroad since 1979. He was in town to visit his mother. He speaks English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Greek, and some Spanish. (“Just add Portuguese to Italian and divide by two,” he said, of the latter.) At the Court of Auditors—“itself a bad translation”—his job is to translate documents on subjects ranging from school milk to nuclear decommissioning. As a vigilante grammarian, he is a blend of Lynne Truss and Lord Mountbatten. His entry for “fiche” reads, “Fiche is a useful word, but it is French.”

Over rabbit pâté, Gardner explained that he had been motivated by the declining quality of E.U. documents, which, he said, are increasingly written by people for whom English is a second (or third or fourth) language. Many of the mistakes he identifies are false friends (“actual” for “current,” “assist at” for “attend”) or reverse-engineered oddities (“transpose” has somehow come to mean “implement”). If Gardner has his way, cows, sheep, goats, and pigs will cease to be “bovine, ovine, caprine, and porcine animals.” We will no longer see such sentences as ‘When the interoperability constituent is integrated into a Control-Command and Signalling On-board or Track-side Subsystem, if the missing functions, interfaces, or performances do not allow to assess whether the subsystem fully complies with the requirements of this TSI, only an Intermediate Statement of Verification may be issued.”

“This is a real hobbyhorse of mine,” Gardner said. “Do you know how we write numbers in the European Union?”

He scribbled a figure: 5,733.997.

Then he wrote down its E.U. equivalent: 5 733, 997.

“This doesn’t look like a number at all in English,” he said. “It looks like one of those games where you have to guess the sequence!”

Gardner is a protectionist in a world of linguistic free trade. Still, he acknowledged the temptation of what might be called the Gyro Effect: it is sometimes less onerous to use an incorrect form when that form is more widely comprehended. “You notice that everyone makes the same mistakes,” he said. “Very often, you go native.”

Gardner conceded that the occasional screwup is inevitable. “When I ask my daughter how she is, and she says, ‘I’m good,’ it grates, but I don’t really mind,” he said. “But what do we do for a living? We write reports. You should be able to read them.” As for his own gaffes, he said, “My most embarrassing mistake is in Italian, and it has something to do with a cigarette holder.” He would not elaborate. “Go out and Google it,” he said.

The waiter, who happened to be French, returned to the table and asked Gardner if he would like some more wine.

“Une petite verre,” he replied.

The waiter walked away, and Gardner groaned.

“For some reason, I can never remember the gender of ‘glass.’ ” ♦

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008.